How to Use Full Featured SpamAssassin on Pair.com Hosted Accounts

I host a domain or two on pair.com. They have great hosting features such as an SSH shell, mysql, php support and more.

They don't however have a full fledged SpamAssassin install. They have a weird stripped down version that only lets you add blacklists and whitelists. You have no way to create custom filters.

This will show you how to install your own local copy of SpamAssassin, use procmail to process the messages, and filter your email through your local SpamAssassin install.

To install spamassassin you can do this:
wget http://opensource.become.com/mirror/apache/spamassassin/source/Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.5.tar.gz
tar -zxvf Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.5.tar.gz
cd Mail-SpamAssassin-3.2.5
perl Makefile.PL PREFIX=$HOME
make && make install

Set up procmail:
vi ~/.procmailrc
:0fw: spamassassin.lock
| /usr/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/bin/spamassassin

:0:
*^{X-Spam-Flag: Yes}
/usr/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/mail/spam

# enable logging
LOGFILE=/usr/home/YOUR_USER_NAME/procmail.log

Set up a few simple spamassassin rules in .spamassassin/user_prefs

#We would blacklist domains like
blacklist_from *.macys.com
#that would block all emails from macys

Log in to my.pair.com.
Go to email management

Make sure your default pair.com account is set to discard all email. I was getting 400+ spams a day to that account when I was not throwing it out.

Create a recipe for your domain.
Click on create new recipe.

type the name of the account, then choose filter.

Enter /usr/local/bin/procmail as the E-mail Filter.
Select Create Filter

You are done, you can try sending some test mail and tailing the log file. But you should be good now.

-Joe